5 DECEMBER 'CLAMOUR OF BEING' WORKSHOP - REPORT AND CONTINUING DISCUSSION

Today the workshop tackled the final two chapters of ‘Deleuze: The Clamour of Being.’ We discussed the oceanic image of the virtual, Deleuze’s relation to politics, experimentation and Badiou’s use of set theory amongst other things.

The presentation began by suggesting that in chapter seven we see the machinery of ‘encounter’ kick into action very strongly. We see what Badiou means by ‘a “collaboration” that [is] … divergent and contrasting’ (page 5). Here we see Badiou outlining what he likes in Deleuze and what he doesn’t, suggesting what he can and can’t make use of and explaining why his philosophy leads him to reject elements of Deleuze.

The Heideggerian concern with thinking, Being and their interlacement/identity is introduced as central to philosophy since Heidegger (echoing Badiou’s claim at the beginning of ‘Being and Event’ that Heidegger is the last universally recognisable philosopher as the first of three assumptions on which to premise ‘the analysis of the current global state of philosophy’ (p. 1)).

We notice on the first page a proposed definition of ‘thought’ for Deleuze. This makes Badiou development of a ‘theory of interlacement’ in Deleuze simplistic – Nick Midgley’s presentation last week opened up the need to keep Deleuze’s different encounters in play. Here Deleuze brings in Leibniz, Cinema and Foucault a lot – he mentions Bergson briefly by comparing Fold and Memory and Nietzsche in order to link force in Foucault and active and reactive forces. However, is this enough to capture what Deleuze means by ‘thought’?

p. 81 If interiority is a result or product it cannot serve to identify the being of thought - interiority is not constitutive. This also avoids establishing relations between subjects and objects that instantiate reflectivity and negativity.

p. 82 Badiou argues that for Deleuze ‘subject’ as operator (instead of difference or ultimately the Eternal Return as operator) places thought in a scientific paradigm (the plane of reference). However, the alternative which Badiou finds developed in Deleuze’s ‘Foucault’ is topology, which is certainly scientific, and we can argue that Deleuze finds in science resources equal to modelling folding. However, for Badiou Deleuze’s use of maths and science is always metaphorical, as we have discussed in previous weeks.

Badiou argues that in Foucault we find the diagnosis of an illusion that structures and the subject are opposed. This illusion is what allows us today to believe that there is a place and status for the subject in places where structuring is not complete. We need to get away from the couple formed by structural objectivity and constitutive subjectivity.

At page 83 Badiou writes that ‘…given that thought is set in motion by disjunctive synthesis, and that it is solicited by beings who are in nonrelation, how can it be in accordance with Being, which is essentially Relation?’ How is the nonrelation a relation?’ (‘Foucault’ page 65). Badiou sees the fold as the response with its linking of thought (disjointed cases) and Being (the eternal return of the Same – where the same can only be said of difference). He draws from this the conclusion, at page 84, that for Deleuze we must find ourselves constrained to follow the One – we sense here that for Badiou Deleuze’s subversion of the One - as we find with other similarly traditional and restrictive terms that carry a lot of baggage (e.g. God, universal, the Same, attribute, Being, Idea, problem) - fails and doesn’t make the One productive and liberating.

We are then able to think nonrelation as relation – in Foucault truth is served by the two with no direct relation (a volcanic line). Badiou refers to Nietzsche and he develops this in a piece translated in ‘Pli’ (as ‘Who is Nietzsche?’ in volume 11 (2002) ‘Nietzsche: Revenge and Praise’).

At page 85 Badiou is enthusiastic about Deleuze’s notion that the closed set or actual object is kept open by a point of opening. But he then asks whether Deleuze doesn’t then introduce ‘a sort of theoretical convenience’? If the attachment of all objects to the rest of the universe is ‘marked’ on the object itself, what is Deleuze’s reason for invoking the exposure of thought to ‘the absoluteness of the disjunction’? Badiou then activates the creative-destructive machinery of encounter by asking: ‘Would it not suffice to be attentive to this “somewhere” where the objects remains open?’ He asks why we should attribute the chance of thought to a discernable division (actual and virtual) of its objects? Yet Deleuze can play a positive role in Badiou own thought when he invokes the ‘dis-sheltering’ of the closed set or actual object, its point of opening. Badiou writes: ‘Yes, indeed!’ – the words leap from the page in an affirmative and light-footed dance. Thinking a situation involves what isn’t sheltered by ‘the general regime of things.’ Badiou fleshes out what his encounter with Deleuze is producing as an evental site without either the virtual or the Whole. On the edge of the void and almost withdrawn from shelter. It isn’t in or out, without interior or exterior.

At page 86 Badiou defines Deleuze’s intuition here as animation by the outside whose element is force – ‘a constrained animation.’ For Badiou spontaneity is inferior to thought – again Badiou seems to ignore or deny Deleuze subversion of terms: spontaneity is surely present as long as it is not the spontaneity of the pre-constituted subject, just as thought and Ideas are productions of an outside and ‘I think’ and ‘I am’ are productions of Ideas and individuation respectively.

Badiou argues at page 88 that in Foucault Deleuze finds that each force reaches its own specific limit and this brings about separation. The specific limit is also the common limit that links forces. We have a topology of space and the One of the topology.

Badiou develops two senses of Being in Deleuze. At page 89 he writes that for Deleuze surface/outside and the limit are these two senses. The fold must be simultaneously the movement of a surface and the tracing of a limit: the fold of a sheet produces a common limit of two subregions but is not a tracing on the sheet. The fold as limit of pure outside is a movement of the sheet itself.

The presentation then turned to page 91 where Badiou argues that the fold makes every thought ‘an immanent trait of the already-there’. Therefore everything new is an ‘enfolded selection of the past.’ This draws upon Badiou reading of the virtual as fullness of the pure element of quantity, of quality, continuity, pure variety, biological ideas, social ideas…

The fold is an ‘epistemological invariant’ of the Eternal Return: for Badiou then the ER requires a theory of knowledge and invariants that allow it to function. This return to Badiou’s dissatisfaction with Deleuze production of the new as a repetition or recommencement under the jurisdiction of the One. He writes that ‘the thought of the new plunges the new’ into the virtual past. This plunging suggests that for Badiou the new is drowned in the fullness of the virtual or pure past. It needs to breath and this calls for the void. This of course refers us to the last sentence of ‘Difference and Repetition’ quoted by Badiou in the title of this book: ‘a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings…’ (p. 304) Emphasising such an image has rhetorical effect and is repeated elsewhere in the book. He then argues that Deleuze engages with new ideas in order to test them and show that they were never ‘absolute beginnings.’

Badiou then makes the huge claim that for Deleuze philosophy is fused with art, This is because new ways of folding are discovered (rather than ‘the new’ itself) and thinking is reduced to philosophy or ‘a single configuration of its act’ (philosophy-art). With a full past thinking is reduced to thinking about the past and philosophy-art alone can do this, hence it is thought. This relies upon Badiou’s reading of a limited relation between Deleuze and science. Art and philosophy are ‘indiscernible companions’ because they alone capture the intuition of the One.

Badiou then fires up the machinery of critique by claiming that he can conceptualise ‘absolute beginnings’ and opposes this to the absoluteness of the One in which beginnings are submerged and made monotonous repetitions of the pure past. He argues that we must side with the new to the exclusion of the One (if we are to think ‘a political revolution, an amorous encounter, an invention of the sciences, or a creation of art as distinct infinities’) via a theory of the void and through Cantor’s plurality of types of infinity.

At page 92 Badiou argues that we must locate thought in much more than philosophy-art if different types of infinity are to initiate truth procedures. Distinct infinities mean incommensurable events. He opposes ‘our bleak world’ and its continuity traversed by rare and discontinuous events to Deleuze’s continuous and full virtual denying the discontinuity that would make room for the new, rare and chance-driven. He writes intriguingly in the last sentence of the chapter that ‘it is a question of taste.’ Is he referring to the taste for practice – Deleuze, he argues, goes for philosophy-art but he wants a range of practices to be accounted for (art, science, love, politics)?

The presentation then turned to chapter 8 begins with ‘the figure of communication between a disjointed singularity and the All.’ Start with the narrowest diagram of forces before plunging into ‘the most composite virtualities’ which circulate and interpenetrate one another. Then follow the ‘large circuit’ until ‘a local inflection of philosophy’s entire past’ makes ‘Deleuze appear as a fine point or crystal that is at once translucent and timeless – just like the crystal balls of clairvoyants.’ He is timeless or eternal because he is productive but also translucent or open for learning and encounter. For Badiou, at page 86, a concern is that ‘There does, in fact, exist a cynical Deleuzianism, poles apart from the sobriety and asceticism of the Master.’ He continues to characterise Deleuze at page 97 in terms of his ‘ironic solitude.’ What does this mean? It can’t be solitude from how we are produced but means withdrawing from an Image of Thought, the accumulations of habit. It takes its bearings as ironic from virtual continuity and so flies above actual relations. Deleuze is for Badiou the philosopher least affected by changes in the world (by the actual and its course) because he took his bearings from ‘the rigorous intuitive method that he had laid down once and for all.’

Badiou argues that for Deleuze’s Bergsonism ‘it is always what is that is right’. We cannot then evaluate life itself and nothing is new because everything is constantly new. Everything is a production of the One, its return. This takes away all militancy – everything is new and so nothing can selected as worthy of fidelity, Life is immobilised because for Badiou what animates it – militancy, fidelity and the subjects they constitute – are not accounted for. Badiou opposes this with rare interruptions or supplements which force our lasting fidelity – rather than the continuity of the virtual with its monotony that means nothing is ever worth being faithful to.

The presentation then turned to the charge, at page 99, that in Deleuze intuition is internal to the immanent changes of the One. This continually depreciates any ‘conceptual stability in the order of theory, of formal equilibrium in the order of art, amorous consistency in the existential order, and organisation in the political.’ Concrete analyses provide the temptation ‘to lay down one’s arms before the sweeping tide of actualisation with its progressive dissolution of all objects…’ Badiou refers to the tide and so again suggests the ocean and the drowning of the new, referring again to the image of a single ocean at the end of ‘Difference and Repetition.’ The virtual as full and excluding the void through its continuity is again the subject of Badiou’s critique and is firmly tied in his reading to the negative and hopeless connotations of the ocean. A great deep ending action and life, removing all hope of resistance from an overwhelmed subject. It also aids his critique because it is not a space of action but undermines or unground these, submerges action. It is the limit at which loss of form merges terms in a point of indiscernability so that neither can be defended. The fluid and ideal continuity of the virtual is played upon here. Against it Badiou argues that our age threatens us with ‘powers of decomposition’ – the tide comes in and washes away sand-castles and unstable structures. The need for fidelity to outlast the tides is emphasised against the changes and becoming of the virtual providing its continuity. Badiou talks about building (contrast to Deleuze’s emphasis on ungrounding) ‘an internal barrier’ to enable thought to resist (using resources of logic, maths and abstraction as well as those of ‘organised emancipatory politics’). He locates this in a tradition going back to Descartes and Plato. He has built up to this conclusion by arguing that Deleuze’s use of maths and science is metaphorical.

The presentation then moved to the final pages of the book. At page 100 Deleuze function as ‘a power of reception’ for the return for great conceptual creations and ‘the whole of philosophy is treated as an absolute detemporalised memory.’ Again, ‘detemporalised’ is misleading – eternity is subverted and is not anti-time but time out of joint, time not measurable or linear. The ‘exact eternity’ of philosophers is living only when actualised in living thought. Badiou writes intriguingly that in their correspondence Deleuze tried to pin on him the ‘crushing accusation’ of the epithet ‘neo-Kantian.’

At page 101 Badiou argues that for Deleuze everything is constantly replayed. In this way Platonism will never cease to be overturned because from the beginning it has been overturned (Stoics, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze…). Badiou opposes to this the overturning of anti-Platonism. At page 102 he finds that Deleuze was most progressive in his approach to Plato but failed to finish with anti-Platonism itself. Deleuze was a pre-Socratic in the sense of being a physicist, one of the ‘thinkers of the All’ for the Greeks. But Plato opposed philosophy as a Great Physics in order for thought to be philosophical independently of ‘any total contemplation of the Universe or any intuition of the virtual.’ This for Badiou is resistance to being swept away by the virtual. Deleuze then as physicist is for Badiou speculatively dreaming, prophetic but without this providing us with any promise (no promise of the militant subject sought by Badiou). Salvation by ‘the All’ promises nothing because it is ‘always already there.’

The discussion began with the link being made between ‘simple traces of [actualisation’s] passage in the sand’ (page 99) and Foucault’s notion that man is nothing but writing on the sand that will be washed away. Badiou picks up on the notion of grace and that in Deleuze everything is grace and thus nothing is grace, the antidote being that it occurs interruptively. This was referred to Deleuze’s ‘Expressionism in Philosophy’ where to be is to be beatified. It was argued that here grace is internal to you and that this the real difference between Deleuze and Badiou. For Badiou grace is external, it happens in the world. He wants the new, a breakthrough and the continual folding of folding. It was argued that this is part of Badiou’s argument that Deleuze does not use his philosophy for politics. It was suggested that Badiou approaches philosophy as purely political.

It was suggested that at page 99 we see signs of a reading of Deleuze as ‘vulnerable to the powers of decomposition that our grandiose and decaying capitalism liberates on a large scale.’ This follows if whatever happens (through difference) is good and there is to be no resentment (which could be taken to mean no resistance). What you build is only s product of capitalism to meet your desire for philosophy. The virtual is not a foundation for resistance to capitalism and can be equated with capitalism’s production of desires itself. New desires produces new philosophies. This was linked to Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo’ and the notion that here the idea is not about opposition but going as far as you can go as part of a market of ideas. It was argued that Badiou is antoganised by people who use Deleuze to oppose Marxism. This was related to Lyotard and his work on the molecular. Everyone likes being fucked by capital. It was argued that it is crude to lump Deleuze together with this. Badiou requires actual ways of judging, constructing other roots of actualisation and ways oif analysing the truth of events of religion, revolution and so on. Reference was made to Schelling and the criticism that according to his thought in the night all cows are black. There are no distinctions here and likewise in Deleuze you cannot judge capital as a negative thing because if the Eternal Return selects differences this doesn’t exclude the mechanisms of capital. In response reference was made to Deleuze’s statement that life doesn’t need philosophy. People don’t need philosophy and they do politics. Politically relevant writing is in fact propaganda. Does Badiou subsume other truth procedures under politics? It was suggested that the very need for a structure of infinities relies ultimately on politics in Badiou.

A further point of discussion was the notion at page 102 that Deleuze ‘did not support the idea that “the great Pan is dead.”’ It was pointed out that for pagans the whole point is that Pan is everything because Pan is death. Reference was made to ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ where Deleuze and Guattari talk about Pan and sorcery in a very positive sense.

Also of interest to us what Badiou remark at page 91 that ‘it is a matter of taste’ when it comes to his and Deleuze’s dispute over the One. This seemed to us to refer to Nietzsche where taste (as intuition) is before truth. Deleuze makes use of this because to get rid of judgement structures and still make decisions means you rely upon taste/intuition rather than the rational, indifferent mathematical set theory.

We noted that for Badiou the hisyoricity of philosophy found in Deleuze’s vision is not progressive. The Deleuzian history of philosophy is a non-linear time because bringing principles to bear isn’t going to capture the truth of the situation. It was asked whether there is a before and after in Deleuze? Reference was made to the beginning of ‘Difference and Repetition’ where Deleuze writes that thoughts of difference and repetition are in the air. Is this significant or just a colloquial reference to the present philosophical conversations and evidence of Deleuze locating himself as a philosopher. In the latter sense such remarks reflect linear and actual time rather than virtual time. It was pointed out that Deleuze has written of himself that he is a philosopher and it was argued that this is not a philosophical statement – so what is it doing in a work of philosophy?

Also discussed was Badiou development of structure and subject at page 82. At this intersection thought and Being’s interlacement is situation by Deleuze. It was argued that Badiou is locating Deleuze as a poststructuralist because this point in history isn’t important – the move is conceptual. Badiou’s argument that Deleuze’s makes thought a philosophy-art fusion was also discussed in terms of its development from earlier arguments that maths is metaphorical in Deleuze’s thought. It was argued that also behind this move is Badiou’s concern to link Deleuze to Heidegger. Deleuze presupposes Heidegger because he has cleared some ground for him but can we extend this to relating Deleuze’s philosophy of art to Heidegger’s later thought? It was suggested that the present issue of ‘Collapse’ helps us here because in it Badiou says he is essentially talking about discourse in doing his ontology. He is then closer to Heidegger. and also to Derrida, in the sense that everything is the text and there is no outside (no virtual).

Reference was then made to being forced to think for Deleuze, referred to by Badiou at page 86. It was related to making a film by just starting and don’t know where to go. Ho does this relate to the future? How do you put yourself in a situation where forces occur. This was linked to the notion of a bottleneck: being creative without forcing yourself into certain ideas. You need space for improvisation – does this mean forcing something into the world and onto your ontology. It was argued that in chapter 3 of ‘Difference and Repetition’ where being forced to think is developed we find the diagnosis that thought is lazy. Everyone is lazy and thinks in clichés. We need a big thought to get out of it and also stupidity and animality as antidotes to laziness. It is so difficult for thought to do something new. It was also argued that Deleuze is at his most practical and useful in making possibilities, creating bottlenecks – a pure situationist slogan. Making a film lasting a very long time and with a great amount of a certain subject. You stop at a certain time and certain amount short of the aim but have got a lot of material out of it. You have started by making an impossible situation – is this the virtual? It’s going to produce something different to the original idea you had. It is better if the original idea you had was more bizarre. This is experiment and, it was argued, Badiou doesn’t grasp this. He wants deduction that starts from a rare point. However, in maths string theory comes from ‘ramming’ lots of different variables into the explanations – maths does this a lot. Badiou misses the notion of creating a space – creating a space brings other things together. It was suggested that for Badiou we need certainty in order to find the right response to a problem – it forces you to face things you might not want to face. At page 86 Badiou says that there is no spontaneity in Deleuze because this opposes a common reading of Deleuze and Badiou wants to be polemic. However, he misses experiment. Reference was made to Plato’s ‘Meno’ where the slave boy’s recollection is experiment, using tools at hand when they fit into the deduction.

The eleventh Plateau ‘1837: Of the Refrain’ was brought into the discussion with notions of chaos and then the drawing of the boundary, marshalling the forces of chaos. The movement involved are happening always at the same time. There is always a smooth space, always a constant activity. The theme of counter-actualisation was introduced here and related to the dice throw and to experiment. How are you able to do/think/write anything? You assume a certain ontology and then you experiment. You need to assume an ontology (e.g. actual-virtual) and then test it. The need for grounding in the face of pure chaos was related to the idea that with the oceanic and tidal virtual which Badiou finds in Deleuze we get only sandcastles when it comes to actual constructions. But are sandcastles a positive image? The need to ground, to draw boundaries, brings in different levels and conditions: the material, ideas, intensities, individuation… Yet fundamentally, it was argued, thought must go somewhere else – going into another space because something forces it. Reference was made to William Burrows’ ‘do easy’ where the practice of everything you do should continue to be completely natural and you keep doing it until becomes completely easy. It is the process of turning yourself into an automaton. It is one of Burrow’s techniques of space creating for making films. Another point of reference was G. E. Moore writing on civilisation and discusses motivational speakers. He says that in fact civilisation advances because we don’t have to think about what we do – this is a becoming automaton. This was related to computers replacing thought with procedure.

Also discussed was Badiou statement that his multiplicity is Cantorian at page 91. This, it was argued, means that he needs to affirm the continuum hypothesis which is now outside of mathematics because it is a straightforward assumption in maths that is made for the sake of argument. It is not assumed in string theory of black hole theory. Gödel and Cohen were referred to as those trying to show that it makes no difference whether one does or does not accept the continuum hypothesis. The axiom of choice are independent because set theory works with and without them. Set theory using the axiom of choice is in fact a very odd kind of set theory. The axiom of choice gives you an intensive order where one element is bigger than the other. You arbitrarily choose a particular ordering whereas in Deleuze’s actualisation has to come from the virtual, crystallising out of it via a strange precursor. Therefore the axiom of choice is transcendent to set theory and one way of providing intensive order to sets. For Badiou we have choice and for Deleuze realisation.

Finally we discussed our impressions of the book we had now read and discussed over the four weeks of the workshop. It was praised for thinking through the rigor of non-relation, taking the ideas to their limit. Getting rid of badly analysed composites and emphasising the purity of Deleuze’s ideas. It was also argued that in assuming that we can’t extract a politics from Deleuze Badiou is forcing a much needed response. He points out where the problem occurs – this means that you need to go deep into Deleuze to deal with the problems.

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28 NOVEMBER 'CLAMOUR OF BEING' WORKSHOP - REPORT AND CONTINUING DISCUSSION

The workshop tackled chapters 5 and 6 today. The subjects focused upon included time and truth, movement, the new, chance, dualism, subject and event.

Today Nick Midgley presented on the text. He first suggested that Badiou seeks univocity in his own way through integral actuality. Hence Deleuze is a dualist because he introduces the virtual and undermines univocity. Nick then turned to Badiou’s focus on the paradox of contingent futures at page 60 of ‘The Clamour of Being’. Time needs to be suppressed in favour of truths and the role of time in Deleuze undermines the role that truth needs to play. Nick critiqued Badiou’s reading which suggests that Deleuze still holds to truth, albeit in a devalued form. Contrary to this it was argued that Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. There is a need to get away from the image of truth so as to get an image of thinking – truth and falsehood involves playing games (triviality) when what we need is the interesting and productive. We must seek the singular, remarkable and interesting rather than asking ‘is it true?’

Badiou deals with Deleuze’s critique of truth by arguing that the version of truth which is the object of critique is a trivial one. It involves good and bad copies of an original. Badiou seeks to locate a deeper notion of truth in Deleuze but it was pointed out that he cannot find a quote to back this up. Badiou argues that in Deleuze everything is simulacrum and therefore simulacra are the truth. Nick argued that this isn’t a Deleuzian kind of move. For Deleuze philosophy isn’t inspired by truth and what matters in philosophy is what motivates it. Deleuze finds in Nietzsche certain diagnoses of thought leading to questions like ‘is thinking resentful?’, ‘who has that thought?’, ‘what drives it?’ And this leads to Deleuze ask ‘are problems productive or not?’ Therefore, it was argued, Badiou makes a very formal move when it is important for Deleuze that we don’t call simulacra truth because with truth we get transcendence. We cannot, according to Deleuze, say that Spinoza is true and Kant is false. We need to emphasise Deleuze’s use of Nietzsche’s ideas which means that what characterises and drives a thought is important rather than the result or product.

The presentation then highlighted Badiou remarks at page 65 of ‘The Clamour of Being’ on Deleuze’s ‘Foucault.’ He describes it as ‘the most appeased’ (or friendly) writing on truth of Deleuze’s works. He highlights the role of games of truth and how here truth is inseparable from a procedure establishing it. Nick pointed out that in ‘Difference and Repetition’ truth is only the empirical result of sense and how solutions don’t have any meaning without the problem they respond to. Therefore the procedure for establishing truth links truth to its genesis. It was argued that in this light for Deleuze in his ‘Foucault’ truth is still trivial. There are truths in a discourse but they are no deeper than that. In this book the dualism of the visible and articulable is elaborated (for example prisons as disciplines and jurisprudence as legal discourse). Two discourses are different domains. This was referred to Bergson’s notion of ‘badly analysed composites’ which Deleuze develops in his ‘Bergsonism’. Nick then explained the different senses given to dualism by Deleuze in his ‘Foucault’:

1. dualism found in Descartes (substances) and Kant (faculties),

2. dualism as provisional stage leading to monism (found in Spinoza and Bergson). For example, in Bergson we get a dualism of duration and space, a provisional dualism because ultimately everything is duration.

3. In Foucault we find a preliminary distribution operating at the heart of a pluralism. A micro-physics of power exposes relations of forces prior to strata (two stratas form a dualism). This forms the outside of strata and to think is to reach the unstratified.

Nick argued that Badiou faces the problem of whether we can say that Deleuze is closer to Foucault or to Bergson and Spinoza. In ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ a micro-physics of power is elaborated and this is closer to Foucault. The Foucault case provides a pluralism and not a monism. Badiou therefore appears to be on weak ground here.

The presentation now turned to the notion of truth in Badiou as the undoing of time just as revolution is the end of an epoch. It is interruption. For Badiou truth is completely other than knowledge, something he finds in mathematics where incompleteness shows that no self-consistent totality is possible. Set theory is a structural condition for us. Badiou argues that truth in Deleuze leads us to ‘the Relation’. Bergson leads Deleuze to focus on time without spatial categories. This is time that isn’t a chronology. However, Badiou reads Deleuze as a Platonist on the basis of this purification of time. At page 60 he argues that in Deleuze time is not temporal. We return to Deleuze’s alleged classicism. Yet his Bergsonism suggests that we move not from time to eternity but to time without spatial categories. It can be argued that this shows him to be more of an empiricist with a better method of seeing what time is.

The presentation then moved to chapter six and its list of misinterpretations of the Eternal Return. Badiou explores the idea of a single throw of the dice at page 74-75. Nick referred to ‘The Logic of Sense’ where the actor is a counter-actualisation because every mortal event is in the single Event so that there is no room for accident or resentment. The point was made that Badiou doesn’t give much argument against the single Event. For him chance is plural. The chapter ends by referring to Deleuze’s own death (how it is ‘somewhat disconcerting’ that he cannot rejoin the discussion) and then in the last Badiou line declares ‘death is not, and can never be, an event.’ (p. 76-77) Is he suggesting that it isn’t through the disconcerting death of Gilles Deleuze that things will happen? More obviously he of course is referring to his own critique of Deleuze notion that the virtual continually recommences its production. Anything actual dies in order to make way for this operation of the One.

The discussion that followed first focused upon Peter Hallward’s reading of Deleuze. The subject as being out of action is expressed in the figure of the soldier dying on the battle field. Withdrawl from action allows contemplation, seeing everything. But, it was argued, Deleuze is concerned with activity, with enacting through counter-actualisation. This was to counter the immobility and eternity located by Badiou as an ideal of doing nothing in any actual sense. As Nick argued in his presentation, Deleuze seeks to get rid of spatial terms, points of reference or points of measurement. However, his ‘static genesis’ is a positive production despite not resembling the actual. The actual needs what does not resemble it to move forward. Therefore Deleuze subverts terms like eternal and static. Do they then lead to actual inactivity? Is taking away actual terms from time to divorce it from the time and space of the actual?

The point was raised that in the contraction of presents (the first of the three syntheses of time presented in ‘Difference and Repetition’ chapter 2) difference is contracted or made internal. The internal difference is then the source of counter-actualisation. However, it was suggested that this is a Hegelian move. We grasp the eternal by engaging with a particular aspect as the internal difference. This is a stage on the way to becoming an absolute Idea. You have the becoming of the absolute Idea. Furthermore, do we have becoming if we have throw after throw of the dice. How are they related? If we have complete interruptions no event leads to the next event. There is no becoming. This was related to dualism which is presented in ‘The Logic of Sense’ as the Stoic distinction of between Chronos and Aion. There are no causal relations between them. Becoming is the virtual actualizing and but there are no relations between actuals, no becoming for the actual. This was referred to Deleuze’s ‘Proust and Signs’ where there is a non-actual continuity or relation between moments where an essence is expressed. Combray as essence was never lived and its actual expressions do not resemble one another, in other ways they have a virtual continuity but not an actual one.

Reference was made to ‘Difference and Repetition’ page 136 where ‘the new’ is not the historically new and so is not something that can go out of date. It is new from the outset, always different and the different is what returns according to Deleuze’s Eternal Return. For Badiou the virtual is always too full for the new to come about or to have chance operate, hence the need for the void (‘Clamour’ p. 76). At page 64 reference is made to Heidegger and the act of remembering. For Heidegger the new is always near but we lose access to its newness. When we study history the truth of that history is made past. We need to think as the Ancient Greeks thought. Yet for Badiou we have to forget time to think truth because for him truths are not in the past (page 60). The past is an ontological notion while truths aren’t. Fidelity to the event is temporal and through it the subject is constituted, but this is added through ontology and not in or between events themselves.

In response to Badiou’s forgetting of time the need to study the past to know what the events mean was suggested. Yet forgetting is to allow the new event to happen, to a avoid any over determination by history and fact. Yet, it was argued, when the French Revolution started is a matter of history. However, for Badiou this is a matter of knowledge and not truth. The subject is constituted through the time of fidelity to the event. The event will have been true on the basis of the practice that constitutes the subject – therefore it is not a matter of what we say is, or is not, an event. If we concentrate on the facts of history we reduce the event of truth to the trivialities of knowledge.

It was asked whether we have pure situationism in Badiou? Historical information has no impact. The empty set isn’t given in the situation but is of the situation. In Badiou it is the ontological that gives continuity and links things. Events aren’t linked. In contrast, for Deleuze continuity is the virtual.

In Badiou set theory isn’t a condition for us in the sense of being a historical fact. Instead it will have been an event through the practice that constitutes the subject. It has been a structure of situations, a condition. It is not a fact but part of practice, or rather practice (which constitutes the subject) is fidelity to the event. The structure of the situation changes after a new revolution and so set theory, it seems, could become no longer the condition of practice. Yet if truth is infinite the new is always new. An event doesn’t go out of date because events don’t relate through time.

The point was also raised that time is the ‘being there’ of the concept in Hegel. However, for Badiou to have things that are always true we need to leave time out. He sees Deleuze’s virtual as too full to provide the new, it doesn’t have the scope to account for the new because a void is needed to allow chance to occur through itself.

Reference was made to Badiou’s ‘Being and Event’ page 233 where the same situation and the same event produce different fidelities. For example, October 1917 produces the fidelity of Stalinists and Trotskyites. The paradoxes discovered by maths in the early twentieth century lead to the fidelity of both axiomatic maths and intuitionism in maths. We wondered whether for Deleuze this involves different events with a common production? Perhaps in Deleuze’s ‘Proust and Signs’ the essence of Combray produces different events. Does fidelity to the event in Badiou determine what the event is? This gives too much weight to the subject who is really constituted as fidelity to the event. The event breaks into the world as the ideal into the material, as the incorporeal event in Deleuze’s ‘Logic of Sense’ seems to do. Is there a doubling of the event as there is for Deleuze in the emergence of an elementary consciousness (‘Difference and Repetition’ p. 221)? Is it a performative doubling? It ‘cuts’ through the course of time. However, for Deleuze this is only from a human and actual point of view because for the virtual there is only fullness and complete determination, the continuity out of which actual ‘cuts’ emerge.

A notion was introduced from astro-physics of black wholes as singularities. Things disappear into a black whole but there is a dense and substantial object in the middle, something defined by the galaxy or fields of forces of which it is the motor.

A number of questions and problems were identified at the end of the session: A further point was the link between affirmation and the difficult notion of counter-actualisation in Deleuze. Furthermore, how does coming to bear the wound in Deleuze relate to fidelity in Deleuze? How is the event prior to fidelity? Is the subject collective? For Badiou individuals and subjects are distinguished so that we cannot assume the individuality of the subject. A link was made to Nietzsche where the lamb and the eagle have different fidelities to the event. Are there lots of subjects/fidelities and therefore lots of truths? Do situations play a role in the actualisation of an event? This brought us back to the difficult notion of ‘feedback’ that was discussed last week and, as was pointed out, has problematic Hegelian connotations.

A further issue concerned Deleuze’s relationship with Kant which Badiou sees as relatively unimportant. In what sense, and at what point, does Kant’s thought move beyond epistemology to a philosophy of production? This could be located in the problems concerning teleology and the organic in ‘The Critique of Judgement’ and in the ether proofs found in ‘Opus Postumum.’ It was suggested that this undermined what Kant achieves in the first Critique. However, can we say that Kant was trying to extend critique by giving the material its own role in the process, freeing it from uncritical notions? However, can critique survive without a subject that operates it? Does Deleuze undermine the mechanism of critique, the means of justifying critical moves? In this way a lot of questions and problems were uncovered in this session establishing further vital and challenging grounds for discussion at next weeks workshop and here online.

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21 NOVEMBER 'CLAMOUR OF BEING' WORKSHOP - REPORT AND CONTINUING DISCUSSION

This week chapters 3 and 4 of ‘Deleuze: The Clamour of Being’ were under discussion. We continued our discussion of the mathematics used by Deleuze and Badiou and also explored feedback systems, the possible, the organic versus the abstract (or biology versus thought) and the ‘unequal odd’ virtual and actual halves of the object in Deleuze. References below to Deleuze's 'Difference and Repetition' are to the older format of the Paul Patton translation, not to the new compact edition.

The ten minute presentation was this week given by Edward Willatt and began with Badiou’s focus on Deleuze’s critique of categories. At page 32 he argues that difference must not be imitative for Deleuze, no matter how multiple or flexible, since formal divisions or categories are general and distant from production. This seems to capture Deleuze’s concern that difference be productive and internal to the production mechanism, that it be expressive and not imitative. Also brought up was Badiou’s concern with ‘Deleuze’s philosophical language’ at page 33. He argues that an active-passive duality is commonly identified throughout Deleuze's work, giving rise to an image that Deleuze himself didn’t intend but encouraged through his philosophical language. This seems to demonstrate the corrective value of Badiou’s reading in that he wants to preserve the philosophical rigor of Deleuze’s work. His attack on the active-passive duality as an image of Deleuze's thought seems very relevant if we want to talk about, for example, individuation as a process without this appearing as a passive and actual receptacle of virtual creativity.

Badiou’s focus on Deleuze’s use of structuralism was also dealt with by the presentation. There is a concern that this aspect of his thought overbalances the system in going so far from the actual and determination that we don’t see how we can get back. Can we get back from the ideal operation of the empty square to an account of material individuation? Alberto Toscano in his 'Theatre of Production' poses just this problem when he focuses upon Deleuze’s treatment of the problem of individuation. He writes that in Difference and Repetition the disjunction between the virtual and the actual is a disjunction internal to, and generated by, the processes of ontogenesis themselves. He distinguishes this from the ‘Logic of Sense’ where a quasi-cause is needed. He argues that from the point of view of the problem of individuation we must emphasise Deleuze’s development of internal difference ‘as a process that requires the dramatization of internal multiplicity in intensive systems and spatiotemporal dynamisms.’ (p. 174-175) This analysis seem highly relevant when we note that as part of his reading Badiou argues that in Deleuze structure is simulacrum and as such does not enter into the sense that it fabricates or sustains. The problem with Deleuze’s structuralism seems to be its distance from other aspects of his system. Yet he wants to combine structure and genesis. He seems to want individuation to play a creative role in the process as well as Ideas, to balance the extremes that have opened up dramatically for us through our discussions of Badiou's ‘Deleuze: The Clamour of Being’.

Chapter four begins with Badiou’s argument that in Deleuze the two ‘nominal’ names of Being (actual and virtual) express the deployment of the One or univocal Being. The virtual is the ground of the actual. This was called into question in order to bring into play the actual processes that Deleuze seems to talk about. It was argued that the clear-confused seems to refer to individuation and the distinct-obscure to Ideas. These two extremes in Deleuze’s system – ideal and material – demand our attention. If you start with one extreme, as Badiou does and emphasises this through his focus on Deleuze’s structuralism, isn’t there a need to see if the other extreme fits in? If Deleuze’s system fails it is because he can’t fit in or hold everything together in a meaningful way. The difference between the two extremes is to be internal to the system. Badiou talks about the need for internal difference to operate but then to neglect it when collapsing the actual into the virtual in his reading of Deleuze. We have different parts of Deleuze work, even parts of the same book as we see in ‘Difference and Repetition’, threatening to go off in different directions. How does the empty square relate to the problem of individuation? The presentation used in the figure of the fractured self, as Deleuze develops it, has as three aspects: ‘I think’, ‘I am’ and time. Isn’t this the expression of Ideas and individuation respectively (in 'I think and 'I am' respectively), pure thought thinking itself and the material individuating itself whilst being related by the pure form of time?

Badiou describes Deleuze’s use of musical order as a metaphor at page 44, as he did with his use of maths in chapter 1. This seems to go against the notion that the music we write is pure production expressing itself, as with ‘I think’ and ‘I am’ as they emerge as aspects of the fractured self.

The presentation then took a critical stance towards Badiou’s assessment at page 45 that Deleuze is a classical philosopher – because the multiple needs a rigorous determination of Being as One - and so ‘does not submit to the critical injunctions of Kant.’ While Deleuze is highly critical of Kant for messing up the production mechanism he had discovered, Badiou’s statement needs to be questioned. Kant is seen by Deleuze as projecting products into the production, the empirical into the transcendental. He wants production to be pure, free of the Image of Thought or what is produced and then is taken as fixed and given. Yet Deleuze seems to value critique insofar as it seeks to keep the transcendental pure. This is a highly positive critical injunction if we don’t want the same to return and want to preserve heterogeneity in the production mechanism in order that it not resemble what is produced. Deleuze talks about ‘total critique’ in his ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ as a way to complete Kant’s work. Critique then has a role that needs to be explored. What we cannot talk about (theoretically) for Kant still operates in his system – it has practical reality. Deleuze wants to involve production but in a new way and so, like Kant, we must cease one discourse (the theoretical for Kant and the Image of Thought for Deleuze) in order to grasp the transcendental through its own expression (morality in Kant and differenciation in Deleuze).

Last week Matt Lee developed an analysis of Badiou’s reading of Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’ where after critique, which limits what we can talk about, we have mysticism. This purification through critique seems to have similar connotiations to Deleuze's use of Kant. For Deleuze we can talk about ‘the noumena closest to the phenomena’ (‘Difference and Repetition’, page 222). What needs to be engaged with is Kant’s project of purifying the production of experience from theoretical givens and his giving it a practical reality. Some have suggested that ‘Anti-Oedipus’ can be read as Deleuze and Guattari’s re-writing of the Kant’s ‘Critique of Practical Reason’ (Daniel W. Smith made this case during his keynote paper at the Society for European Philosophy 2004 Conference here at Greenwich. He introduced this move by talking about investments of desire, in ‘Anti-Oedipus’, that are beneath the rational. The rational is a particular configuration of desires. He then argued that reading the second Critique is just like reading Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze dislikes the morality but models Anti-Oedipus upon The Critique of Practical Reason. Present in both books is a faculty with a causal relationship to its object. Desire is the cause of the actuality of its representations because desire is production. Deleuze likes this structure but makes it serve immanence instead of transcendence, thus Ideas must be immanent and synthesise desire. Kant’s desire is made immanent through the influence of Nietzsche, suggesting again that Kant’s critique is of value when extended through Nietzsche to a ‘total critique’). In both texts we can find the notion that desire creates its object. The gap between subject and object is overcome by desire or production, as something pre-individual and as the milieu of individuation itself. We must think the creation of objects through the desire or production that is prior to the self in its isolation from an object. Badiou is of course quite right to say that the moral law is invalid for Deleuze but he doesn’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

At page 46 Badiou refers to ‘the act of the one’ which he has emphasised through his reading of Deleuze’s structuralism. He identifies this as transcendence and finds in this a reason for his divergence from Deleuze in a contrasting form of classicism: the forms of the multiple are always actual and the One is sacrificed. Badiou wants ‘integral actuality’ where a multiple is a multiple of multiples.

At page 46 Badiou offers some clarifications of the virtual which Deleuze had offered in their correspondence. The first of these is that the virtual is the ‘there is’ that precedes all thought. This seems to expand the virtual in a way that we find in Deleuze’s very late work ‘Immanence: A Life…’ – here at page 27 he writes: ‘We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.’

At page 49 Badiou writes that ‘Actualisation breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle.’ He seems to be arguing that Deleuze’s Image of Thought is a process, just as reactive forces in ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ can be seen as a process. He argues that Deleuze breaks with this reactive process in favour of differentiation and divergence and from this draws the conclusion that the existent is a creation rather than a creature when considered in terms of the virtuality that it actualises.

At page 50 he talks about the notion of problems found in Deleuze and gives a very particular reading, extending his emphasis on the virtual. The virtual is ‘the real of the problematic in general’ – it is ‘the universal power of problems and their solutions’. He seems to neglect the problem-solution feedback that introduces two sides or powers of difference in ‘Difference and Repetition’. Whilst the Image of Thought is a reactive accumulation of solutions, there is a sense in which individuations as solutions to problems show the contribution of both problems and solutions to the progress of the system.

At page 51 Badiou deals with the problem of there being virtual and actual parts of the real object – ‘unequal odd halves’ (‘Difference and Repetition’ 209-10). Badiou argues that making parts of the object indiscernible – the object as the point of indiscernability between two distinct images – leads to a disorientated intuition and the indetermination of the actual. This follows from the complete determination of the virtual (page 53). For Badiou then we save the One by making the two unthinkable and thus collapsing the actual into the virtual. The virtual then determines the destiny of everything because the actual is irreal, undetermined and non-objective – it is simulacrum.

The discussion first focused upon the notion of a feedback system. It must create its components and so the actual solutions to virtual problems contribute components of the system rather than simply getting in its way. Problems with this were raised. What about the problem of ‘bootstrapping’ that gets the system going? Could it be a critical mass concept, a bifurcation? The concern was raised that a feedback system sounds Hegelian. The point was made that Deleuze seeks to avoid negation in the internal relations he uses, like that between problems and solutions. Against the notion of a feedback system it was suggested that the virtual is actualising and actual is ‘virtualising.’ Therefore both having a role as two powers of difference relating through their difference but not in the restrictive sense of being a feedback system. Can we talk about systems? Are these too strict for the divergence and differentiation that Deleuze labels ‘production’? This raised the issue of the status of Deleuze’s ‘technical models’ (Difference and Repetition page 220-221). They mustn’t fix the virtual, it eludes such a capture. They must be flexible and diverse as a true expression of production and not limit its expression by embodying an Image of Thought. However, they must capture the selection that takes place when pure virtual production is actualised. If there was no model or system of actualisation it is hard to see how the actual could be different from the virtual. No system can actualise all of the virtual, it is Open and constantly changing, but systems or models must produce actual states of affairs that do not resemble their production. The system enables solutions to arise by relating problems and solutions, it must express the scope of the virtual but in a singular form. We cannot pin down the virtual and yet it must be related to the actual, as problem is to solution.

We discussed how for Badiou one term become more important on the basis of the actual-virtual duality, this term (virtual) is real whilst the duality is formal. It is a ‘purely introductory’ ‘initial formalism’ at work in thought or intuition (‘Clamour’ page 34). At this point the difference between the actual and the individual was raised. It can be argued that for Deleuze the individual is freedom because it is in touch with the pre-individual (problems/Ideas) in its work of solution through its power of clear-confused. The actual perhaps refers to the determined terms that take their bearings from the process individuation through their relation (to the universal prior to all particulars and generalities - cf. ‘Difference and Repetition’ page 171).

Returning to the notion of a feedback system, the idea that actual solutions have the virtual within them and give rise to new problems was raised. This would be to elaborate the particular power of difference at work in individuation. This was made concrete by the intriguing notion that a problem field disappears in the deep sea because light isn’t there and so there is no problem of sight. This is the sense in which Ideas or problematic fields ‘occur here and there in the production of an actual historical world.’ (‘Difference and Repetition’, p. 190) In this sense actualisation has a role. The point was made that this is very compelling when we talk about the organic because here a dynamic relation between problem field and field of solution in each case is convincing. Yet, it was argued, in abstract thought there isn’t this constant resolution of a field but a break or cut, something quite unlike the organic. This was developed in relation to Deleuze ‘Negotiations’ where he talks about not writing for a period of eight years. Is this Hiatus virtual since from it a new book was produced at the end of this period? In response it was suggested that this model sound Freudian. It suggests the return of the repressed in one form or another. It suggests that the subconscious is operating.

A further point concerned Deleuze stated rejection of the notion of simulacrum and his adoption of the notion of rhizome. These are more organic and it was suggested that Deleuze’s thought works better using biology. The simulacrum is more abstract. This opens up an intriguing division in Deleuze that Badiou seems to neglect. The virtual-actual as structure works better as organic and Deleuze develops this, for example, in ‘Difference and Repetition’ chapter 5. The point was also made that the simulacrum, as it is used here, is a notion that Deleuze finds in Klossowski. He combines this with the virtual and this led the questions about whether he can hold such diverse things together, perhaps whether he can hold together what he appropriates from Klossowksi on the one hand and from Bergson on the other.

A further point was that in ‘Anti Oedipus’ Deleuze and Guattari have a notion of machines that only work by breaking down. Is this better than the notion of structure and the empty square? Ideal connections can be made – time is out of joint and we have free connectibility when the empty square affects everything. It was suggested that Deleuze’s structuralism here may be linked to Derrida’s work. Here aporia and aporetic moments are limits of impossibility within possibility. However, it was argued, Deleuze wants to go beyond these transcendental limits that are grounded in the impossible. In ‘Proust and Signs’ Deleuze argues that we mustn’t reduplicate the empirical – or project products into the production mechanism as he argued in his criticism of Kant. For example, a square circle is a limit of geometry and geometry is here mapped out in advance (as possibility). Derrida bases his work on this impossibility structure whereas for Deleuze the virtual is not the possible. He drops the possible-impossible opposition so that the virtual has no conceptual limits.

A further issue was raised around how for Deleuze each philosopher is singular, they create a new problem field. Therefore, how can you compare philosopher’s concepts as we usually do? The philosopher invents his concepts, they are completely his own. How can one philosopher follow on from another? A response raised to this problem was that each plane of consistency is cut out of all the others – it is available to all the others – the worlds of two philosophers are then related by strange nuptials. All are part of the problem field of ‘how to think’- a common, ideal field with a time out of joint that allows for ideal (non-linear) connections beyond those between passing presents.

Also discussed was Badiou’s stand on sets. He sees Deleuze as seeking to talk about things which he thinks cannot be listed in a set. For Badiou it is only the void or empty set cannot be listed, something that, ‘plead as I might’, Deleuze would not except (‘Clamour’ page 47). This is developed at page 48 in a challenge to Deleuze’s multiplicities. These seem rooted in pure variety, such as the pure biological or the pure social. ‘The Idea of fire subsumes fire in the form of a single continuous mass capable of increase. The Idea of silver subsumes its object in the form of a liquid continuity of fine metal. … Continuousness truly belongs to the realm of Ideas only to the extent that an ideal cause of continuity is determined.’ (‘Difference and Repetition’, page 171) This variable spread is behind the extension of forms of the biological, the social … Is this a romantic notion? Certainly Deleuze is resistant to multiples appropriated from set theory because they define things he wants not to define. The fluidity and permeability of Ideas – giving rise to the perplication of Ideas – is behind the extension and of series despite their actual distances and lack of relations.

In discussing Badiou’s multiples a point was made about his use of mathematics. To make the empty set or void productive we need to use a negation structure which is mathematical but not set theoretical. This raises questions about Badiou’s use of maths – can he justify his ontology solely through maths or does he not have to give philosophical reasons for taking set theory and adding to it to make it works the way he wants? In the recent colloquium by Brian Smith of The University of Dundee the move Badiou makes in adding a temporality to set theoretical operations that they don’t have by themselves was brought up.

Also discussed was the criticism beginning at page 51 of Deleuze’s actual and virtual ‘unequal odd halves’ of the real object. Badiou reads the two images involved – actual and virtual – as being simulacra for Deleuze. This makes an image of the virtual, a half of the object, untenable. The point was made that Deleuze is using ‘image’ in the sense in which it is used in Bergson’s ‘Matter and Memory’ and therefore Badiou’s argument is a strange one. He reads ‘image’ in a literal sense when it is in fact grounded in Deleuze’s Bergsonism. This seemed to be a sign of Badiou’s reliance on the simulacrum when it is an image used at one time and later abandoned by Deleuze. It is not his constant term for the actual. Badiou is keen to defend Plato in his own work and his emphasis of Deleuze’s Platonism of the virtual and emphasis of the Platonic term simulacrum seems to be a simplification.

We discussed the univocity Deleuze finds in Spinoza – it ensures there is no hierarchy, with actualisation always dividing and differentiating. Virtual multiplicity can always be divided, it is not to be confused with units. Its total permeability and coexistence is key. It seems as if sets move away from this. Yet a clarification was provided - sets are made up of rules or definitions and not of units. This explains the concern of set theoreticians that we ought not really to talk about sets as collections of things, although this is the easiest way to talk about them for the layman. Thus we get the an ideal rule with enormous depths. Further discussion of set theory revealed that for Badiou maths has shown us that we need to use new rules. It was argued that mathematical reasons are behind his use of set theory. The infinity of multiplicity was too simplistic according to mathematicians and so a more complex notion of infinity was needed. Our notion of infinity needs to be supplemented, according to set theory. Cantor’s continuum hypothesis emerges as a way of dealing with the infinite that set theory opens up.

The point was made that for Deleuze we find a bad infinite in Hegel and a good infinite in Spinoza because of the way they responded differently to calculus. The good response recognises the role of approximation in the sense that you can never get to the limit, invoking the infinitesimal. However – it was suggested – isn’t differential calculus still concerned with counting to infinity and so lacking the complex infinity maths demanded when it found the infinitesimal non-rigorous and wanted to establish its own foundations? Yet – it was argued – with dx/dy we don’t get counting but what Deleuze characterises as the problem of the signification of zeros (DR 171).

Developing the discussion of mathematics, a further defence was mounted of Deleuze’s approach. Maths is concerned with problems and solving them with rules. Without calculus you cannot deal with the world – engineering works in this way, dynamics are worked out to model structures. This is done without knowing what the numbers are, through approximation. It gives access to the virtual and the structure of actualisation for Deleuze. For Badiou the actual is already infinite and so you don’t need the virtual. Maths has its own world and so you don’t need the empiricism of the calculus. For him Being is a void – he asks what is Being (a Heideggerian question) and reads Deleuze as asking this too. Yet – its was argued - Deleuze wants to ask other questions and explicitly rejects the ‘what?’ question. He wants to ask about the remarkable, the interesting and the singular – things that concern practice rather than foundation. Thus in maths it is problems and solutions and not foundations that concern him. What is the relevance to the production of experience of that which isn’t practical, that isn’t a singular or limit point? This returns us to the argument that both Kant and Deleuze seek to overcome a theoretical perspective in order to get to what is significant in practice or the production realised through desire. Foundations aren’t modelled on production, they don’t take their bearings from it.

For Badiou everything is literally capable of being placed in a set of some sort. The point was made that for him set theory is a genuinely historical/revolutionary event of which there are few. They include Jesus, invoking St Paul’s fidelity, (love), the French revolution (politics) and set theory (science - our structural analysis). These are how we are conditioned today.

In this way we arrived at the opposition of the multiples of Deleuze and Badiou. For Badiou Deleuze’s multiplicities are dependent on the One when they try to avoid actual terms and reach for the spread and variability of the virtual. The ideal cause of continuity collapses the actual into the virtual. For Deleuze you cannot get to a virtual multiplicity by concerning yourself with units, you lose touch with the obscurity through which distinction emerges.

[1]At the end of the workshop the call for ‘more Kant, much more Kant’ was described as ‘the cry of the depraved’ by a man with a razor smile.

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14TH NOVEMBER 'CLAMOUR OF BEING' WORKSHOP - REPORT AND CONTINUING DISCUSSION

On the evening of Tuesday 14th November the Volcanic Lines Reading Group tackled the introduction and first two chapters of Alain Badiou's Deleuze: The Clamour of Being. Issues that particularly engaged us, and will no doubt be further dramatised over the next three weeks, included the subject, death, mathematics, politics and monism.

The workshops begin with a ten minute presentation on the main themes of the text under discussion. This week Matt Lee presented and begun by referring to Derrida’s comments at Deleuze’s funeral. As in Badiou’s introduction to ‘The Clamour of Being’ we find the notion of a conversation that never took place but which will nevertheless be completed. Badiou describes it as ‘completing the incompletable: a conflictual friendship that, in a certain sense, had never taken place.’ (‘Clamour’ p 6) Yet the point was made that the tone of friendship and alliance rapidly disappears. The encounter seems to be staged in a very calculated way. The idea of a 'divergent and contrasting' collaboration (as Badiou describes it at page 5) offers a definition of encounter - Badiou contrasts it to the 'convergence and quasi-confusion' in Deleuze and Guattari's friendship. Do we get the internalisation of a more productive difference when Badiou encounters Deleuze?

The presentation also highlighted the figure of the automata in Deleuze which Badiou talks about at page 12. Badiou associates Deleuze’s concept of automaton with his notion of the machinic. Matt pointed out that this avoids themes of destiny and the form of time named Aion in ‘The Logic of Sense’. The Eternal Return is the moment which makes connection with these via the motto ‘amori fati.’ Tying automaton to the machinic seems then to simplify Deleuze’s thinking on the subject. Badiou is concerned to preserve the role of the subject, as militant and as constituted through fidelity to the event, and sees Deleuze as erasing the subject by subsuming it within the machinic. Matt made the point that this is too simple. Deleuze de-emphasises the subject in order to bring forward another process to replace it. This is a different move and not so straightforward as the one Badiou identifies. The subject in Deleuze finds it account in a process that it does not resemble rather than being simply erased by the figure of the automaton.

The themes of life and death in Deleuze loomed large here. If for Deleuze we learn about life through death then this adds to the subject rather than erasing it or failing to account for it. The notion of the death-limit and whether it is positive and productive was a major focus for the session. Matt also questioned Badiou’s equation of Deleuze’s monism with monotony. Spaces are closed down rather than opened, making death the ideal in Deleuze’s philosophy. In this monism, for Badiou, the repetition of different cases implies monotony.

In chapter two of ‘The Clamour of Being’ the reference’s to Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’ were subjected to a highly intriguing analysis by Matt. He raised the prospect that Badiou might have opened the way to our reading him as a ‘modern Tractarian.’ In the ‘Tractatus’ a formal ontology is provided and it is closed and final, with all questions answered. Yet the explosive moment of mysticism occurs. This is the showing of what can only be said according to Wittgenstein’s formal ontology. Matt summed this up as the ramming of the subject into a closed ontology with the openness of the posited subject demanding the mysticism that occurs when everything has been said. If this is valuable for Badiou can we bring him closer to Wittgenstein despite his dislike for the linguistic turn?

Returning to the subject of death, there was discussion about whether it had any meaning for Badiou. For Deleuze it tells us about life because it introduces an impersonal life force. In ‘Difference and Repetition’ Deleuze borrows the two aspects of death described by Blanchot (p. 112-113). They are 1. the personal (concerns the I or ego) ‘which I can confront in a struggle or meet at a limit’ and the impersonal (with no relation to ‘me’) which I don’t meet in the past or present but which is ‘always coming, the source of an incessant multiple adventure in a persistent question.’

The argument was made that Deleuze’s Stoicism involves Aion and destiny at the limit and that this can overcome the sense that death isn’t productive or positive for the actual world it interrupts. Some readings of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism argue that something is built on the basis of the limit (or in its vicinity) such that determination moves forward in response to the Ideas injected by the limit. This brings in Deleuze’s notion of a problem-solution feedback where going to the limit is productive of solutions. The feedback involves the contribution of both sides, of virtual problems and actual solutions, to the process of production.

At this point a question was raised about the value of this encounter. At what point should we say Badiou has got Deleuze wrong? If anything can come out of an encounter, no matter how different from Deleuze’s work, is this productive? Is it relevant or related to Deleuze?

The charge by Badiou that Deleuze employs mathematics metaphorically in his thought was a major topic of discussion (‘Clamour’, page 1, 10). The issue is made complex by Deleuze statement at page 220-221 of ‘Difference and Repetition’ that maths and biology function as ‘technical models’ to allow the exposition and exploration of the two halves of differences (ideal and aesthetic). Yet he associates differential calculus with ‘the universal and its appearance’ (page 171). Is the differential equation directly involved in material processes of actualisation, as a universal operation? The point was made that for Manuel Delanda abstract machines are real processes of different/ciation in Deleuze (see his ‘Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy’). We seem to lose the materiality of differential calculus and other appropriations of maths by Deleuze if it these are metaphorical. The material and physical context of the discovery of differential calculus was raised. It was a ‘method of fluxions’ for Isaac Newton. Different calculus is still used in practice a great deal. For mathematics the infinitesimal, by its vagueness, lacked the rigor to remain valid. Set theory seems to be a very different creature, having developed from attempts to found mathematics. For Badiou it provides direct ontological description. This problem will no doubt come up again.

The point was made that the three principles of Badiou’s reading of Deleuze, listed at page 17, partly rely upon mathematics being metaphorical for Deleuze. It leaves out the fields of individuation that involve universal operations like that presented in the differential equation. These material processes seem to be left out if Deleuze’s thought is (according to Badiou’s three principles) 1 ‘organised around a metaphysics of the One’ 2. proposes ‘an ethics of thought that requires dispossession and asceticism’ and 3. ‘is systematic and abstract.’ Questions were raised about Deleuze’s ethics. Is his Image of Thought (‘Difference and Repetition’ chapter 3) normative? Can you be anti-individualist without being ascetic? The problem of a potential naturalistic fallacy in Deleuze’s ethics was then raised. From descriptions of the presence of desires, how do we jump to what ‘should’ be done?

A further point about Badiou’s three principles was that Deleuze’s thought is certainly at least in part systematic and abstract. Because this is philosophy this has to have some role but needs to be balanced by other dimensions of the system. Others suggested that Badiou is being provocative in response to Deleuze’s image as an affirmer of free desiring. Do principles 2 and 3 make fun of Deleuze? A related point was raised about Badiou’s failure here to talk about his Lacanian conflict with Guattari. The recent reaction against Guattari’s influence on Deleuze scholarship was brought up. Badiou’s reading is highly selective – we had discussed its neglect of individuation and now came up against its disdain for Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari.

The reference to critical and phenomenological interpretations of Deleuze at page 20 was discussed. This opened up the trajectories of Deleuze’s scholarship. Those finding a critical philosophy in Deleuze see the limit being reached and then being built upon, something linking him to Kant and his transcendental deductions. For others going to the limit means attaining the immediate intuition of being. Critique now only clears the ground to allow for this intuition to be attained. This links back to Badiou’s reading of automaton – this seems concur with readings that deny Deleuze’s capacity to theorize a politics because going to the limit subsumes the conditions of political action. If being is immediate we become inactive contemplators of the differentiation of difference in its divine self-sufficiency (as Peter Hallward argues in his ‘Out of this World’). It was suggested that Deleuze’s politics can seem to be tacked on, borrowed from the 1960s popular movements rather than being realised through his system. These issues seem to coalesce around the question of whether the limit is productive for the actual, whether it can be built upon.

The assertion that in Deleuze there is ‘an ontological precomprehension of Being as one’ (p. 20) was challenged. The point was made that this seems too strong - no one could recall a place where Deleuze had used the words ‘Being is one.’ It seems that for Badiou Deleuze botches the multiple and ends up with monotony or linear oneness. Univocity means that Being is said in only one sense – at page 304 of ‘Difference and Repetition’ Deleuze writes that ‘Being is said according to forms which do not break its unity of sense; it is said in a single same sense throughout all its forms.’ The interesting point was made that in translating from the same French phrase we can get both ‘being says itself’ and ‘being is said.’ Thus either ‘being distributes itself’ or ‘being is caused to be distributed.’ This complication of Deleuze’s affirmation of univocity was very intreguing.

The notion that in Deleuze the wound is something you become, you embody your wound even before it has happened, was brought up. This, it was argued, comes from Stoicism and isn’t to be confused with asceticism, bringing us instead to amori fati and the Eternal Return.

The discussion then moved to the concerns over Deleuze’s ability to ground the political. Does the space of action become subsumed by the totality of Virtual time, the differenciation of difference. Badiou’s concerns were related again to Peter Hallward’s critique of Deleuze in ‘Out of this World’ where the needs of the actual, of space and the political, are seen to be neglected by the emphasis on virtual time and creation. This issue gives much food for thought and will no doubt occupy us a great deal. If actual terms involved in political action and strategy are accounted for by Deleuze, it can be argued, they have to be built upon the limit. How does the production or life of the actual relate to a virtual production or life that it does not resemble and which ungrounds and dissolves its forms at the limit?

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COLLOQUIUM - Brian Smith and "The Limits of the Subject in Badiou's 'Being and Event'"

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The paper given by Brian Smith of The University of Dundee on 'The Limits of the Subject in Badiou's Being and Event' was an excillarating tour de force . It brought both mathematics and philosophy into play, making a vital contribution at a time when Badiou studies is in its infancy in this country. The role of mathematics was introduced with its full force, something that philosophy really needs to feel today. Highly important points about how mathematics might respond to Badiou were developed and this took things beyond the philosophical response to Badiou and his use of mathematics.

This is a report of the paper and discussions at the 7th November Volcanic Lines Colloquium, the inaugural event of the Volcanic Lines: Deleuzian Research Group. We would like to thank our speaker for coming to Greenwich and delivering an extremely important and effective paper. The report is taken from my notes and I apologise for any errors or omissions.

The paper began with the birth of the subject and how the use of the axiom of choice brings this about. To explicate this much was made of the distinction between the two numbers systems in Cantor’s work on set theory: extensive or cardinal and intensive or ordinal. In addition the distinction between sets at a finite level and an infinite level was dramatised. Also explained was the nature and role of new infinite cardinal numbers through the distinction of a set’s elements and its subsets. Using the whiteboard set theoretical axioms and proofs were elucidated, including the distinction between belonging and inclusion, allowing for a subset to be included but not belong. The point was made that set theory allows Badiou to talk not in terms of wholes and parts but about inclusion and belonging, establishing yet another fundamental distinction. Returning to the generation of cardinal numbers the move was made to the power set. This was explained as the way in which set theory allows us to get more out of sets by applying certain rules.

The divergence between the two number systems at the infinite level was shown in the variation of the intensive, or that with intrinsic order, whilst the cardinal stays the same. The extensive remains the same while the intensive and structural varies. This for Badiou provides us with the complexity of presentation. The divergence of cardinal and ordinal at the infinite level was explained by the repetition of the operation of 'taking the limit' so as to increase complexity. The question was then raised – is the mathematics of the infinite controllable? The set was clarified as that whose beginning or foundation can be found but which has no end so that where it goes is open. Its beginning is finite but where it is going is not. Cantor’s major problem was elaborated at this point – the undecideable or indeterminate greatness of the power set. For Cantor this must be avoided. To do this he asserts his continuum hypothesis, leading to strict determination and a closed system. The direction Badiou is taking was brought out here because he wants to keep the system open. The move to non-constructible sets concerns what is bigger than what is constructible. This introduces the chance and randomness of unordered sets that inflates infinite levels.

A point that I found particularly striking was that mathematics involves operations that happen all at once or immediately whilst Badiou’s appropriation of mathematics adds a historical structure or temporality. Historical situations (as opposed to natural situations) need a temporal dimension and this calls upon a set whose elements are non-constructible sets. The empty set was then opposed to a foundational set. This, it was emphasised, depended upon Badiou’s situated and temporal appropriation of set theory. Therefore the matheme of the event is not a set we find in mathematics but an inconsistent set. This set belongs to itself and is therefore inconsistent. The continuum hypothesis favoured by Cantor fails in an inconsistent situation and this, according to Badiou, is 'experienced' in this situation. The temporal dimension was developed in terms of the need of the individual to be fully realised as a subject, subject-hood not being given in advance but made a task.

The temporal extension of set theory proceeds via decision or the affirmation of an event. The point was made that this introduced pure chance at the infinite level alongside strict order that can be applied to anything through pure choice (the Axiom of Choice). This combination of freedom and determinism was emphasised. Next the nature of problems in Badiou’s system was developed as creative and novel, requiring a new situation in which to deal with them. Yet, to be more precise, in this move the subject extends the situation but doesn’t create a new one because such a creating would make the subject transcendent to the situation.

Also touched on were things that the speaker found to be haunting Badiou’s system. Deeply interesting and fertile were concluding remarks on the of set theory: ‘There are so many clearly defined bizarre entities within this universe [of set theory] that many of the aspects of philosophy that Badiou wants to reject, especially in recent continental philosophy, can return from the realm of inconsistency, where he banishes them, and associate themselves with some of these more unusual and offbeat products of mathematics.’ The independence of the Axiom of Choice could reintroduce themes of the Other and the sublime. This was explored in the question session in terms of an event which is encountered as something beyond the ‘free rational power to manage’ of the subject. The irrational returns in a ‘self destructive subject’, with fidelity to something beyond reason’s control.

The question session grappled with some fundamental issues brought out by the paper. Badiou’s concern with changing the world, with action, was emphasised. Subjective response to the undecidable event is truth and not knowledge. Set theory shows the immanent extension of the situation so that the problem is affirmed in this new situation. The problem then doesn’t disappear as if it were a lack of knowledge removed by attaining knowledge. This of course resonates with Deleuze’s notion of problems – something the ‘Clamour of Being Reading Group is likely to engage with over the next four weeks at Greenwich and online. The speaker dealt with concerns that Badiou fails to engage with what known by emphasising that truth is distinct from knowledge and that this must be understood through set theory.

A questioner raised the point that chaos in the universe is an important concern for contemporary thought. The speaker linked this to historical temporality with the subject transforming a situation.

The issue of Badiou’s apparent anthropocentricism was raised. Notions of rationality and the potential of a rational individual, distinguished in this way from animals, were discussed. There is no event without a subject and no subject without an event.

The problem of an event that does not come from an evental site was raised in terms of Lacan’s eruption of the Real, a terrifying rupturing of the symbolic network. The speaker emphasised that the event has to be, for Badiou, the starting point of production, something to be taken up by subject. Time then is a succession of events and the truth procedures that carry on from them. The speaker then developed his argument that Badiou’s system or model can involve the event going too far, overwhelming the subject. The axiom of choice means that the subject needs to be able to deal with every event. This, he argued, is the limit of the subject in Badiou’s Being and Event.

The discussion then moved to the simulacrum as it figures in Badiou’s thinking. The speakers critique of Badiou was further explored – showing its depth and challenge. A questioner raised the subject of the Holocaust, asking whether fidelity to this (as if to an event) is a case of evil for Badiou? The speaker raised the problem that a very subjective like structure results from the Holocaust, and he had explained that for Badiou the definition of ethics is ‘to be subjective’. The simulacrum looks like a subject but the event has gone wrong. The speaker argued that this is still a subject according to Badiou’s model, an unintended consequence.

A questioner raised the issue of the religious connotations of the word evil. The speaker considered Badiou’s use of the terms good and evil as deliberately provocative but not religious.

Next a question raised the rarity of the event in Badiou and the notion that we are all rational individuals that inhabit a situation, with freedom in the form of the axiom of choice, but are not all subjects. The speaker puts this in the context of Badiou’s appropriation of set theory which itself gives no reason for the rareness of events. From this he concluded that it is a question of how Badiou applies set theory if we want to find a reason for the rareness of events.

The final question asked about Badiou’s engagement with political conventions like voting. The speaker sketched Badiou’s development from his earlier anti-statist stance to his later concern with the subject involved in the transformation of a state. The questioner was concerned with engagement, with Badiou’s relevance to parliamentary democracy. The point was again made that a concern with knowledge must be contrasted with Badiou’s concern with truth. Concern with maintaining a state would preclude fidelity to an event.

The paper had set out and explained fundamental distinctions in Badiou’s Being and Event and drew out the consequences and difficulties these give rise to. The role of mathematics was brought out in a much needed way. It leaves us a thinking about both the need to engage with the complexity of the system and to consider ‘the limits of the subject.’ We must engage fully and rigorously and in this way arrive at any critical responses we might want to make. In terms of the forthcoming reading group on Badiou’s ‘Deleuze: The Clamour of Being’ we now have an invaluable insight into the specific concerns that animate his reading and critique of Deleuze. It should allow Badiou to play a full role when his encounter with Deleuze is staged, our speaker having given much life to him through a thorough elucidation, appreciation and critical assessment.

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